Cătălina Iliescu-Gheorghiu: a polysystemic model for the comparative analysis of drama from the perspective of descriptive translation studies

Abstract

This review presents a recently published book authored by Cătălina Iliescu Gheorghiu, an academic actively involved in Romanian studies and a translator of Romanian literature. As the title suggests, it is a study that falls under the scope of Descriptive Translation Studies implying the polysystemic model posited by Lambert and Van Gorp for the comparative analysis of drama. The corpus under scrutiny is made up utterances extracted from the play A treia țeapă (The Third Stake) by Marin Sorescu and the corresponding utterances from two of its translations into English. The analytical part is backed up by a solid theoretical framework with its latter section lending the overall structure of the analysis. The categories subject to investigation are (i) preliminary data, (ii) the macro-level structures, (iii) the micro-level structures and (iv) the systemic context. The methodology experimented with drama translation and the findings deriving from it have proved their validity and are valuable input for other similar and possibly more comprising research that can use these findings as hypotheses to be tested further.